Category: Illegal Mining

Posted on January 4, 2025 by Nice Flowers

Latin America in 2024: politics, turmoil and hope

In 2024, Latin America continued facing chronic issues of deforestation, ecosystem contamination, violence, habitat loss and political turmoil.
Changes brought on by presidential elections in several countries have not brought on significant changes for the environment, at least not yet, with effects still to be seen in the years to come.
Increased criminal activity in the region remains a serious obstacle to conservation work, endangering local and Indigenous communities, while highlighting governments’ inability to tackle narco-trafficking and its associated consequences.

Throughout a year in which Latin America saw elections in six countries and prepared for the biodiversity COP16 in Colombia, the region continued its struggle with extreme weather events, criminal activity threatening ecosystems and development encroaching on communities and wildlife habitats. At the same time, community efforts toward conservation, environmental justice and implementation of nature-based solutions kept up. Below we selected several key stories we reported on last year – they are good opportunities to refresh one’s memory about what has happened, but also set our expectations for the issues carrying on into 2025.

Political change across the region

In El Salvador, the re-election of Nayib Bukele posed environmental concerns, as his agenda prioritizes development, security, and attracting foreign investments over the country’s natural assets. In 2017, El Salvador was the first country in the world to ban mining but fears that Bukele would reverse that ban have since become a reality.

In Panama, presidential race winner Jose Raul Mulino has stated he didn’t have plans to re-open the Cobre Panama mine, but his plans are also more focused on job development and infrastructure than on environmental issues. Last year, the government’s relocation of the island community of Gardi Sugdub – a first for the country – highlighted Panama’s tangible struggle with climate change impacts.

Families are migrating from Gardi Sugdub, a tiny island belonging to the Indigenous Guna Yala people of Panama, packed with houses to the edge of the water, due to sea level rise. Image by Michael Adams via Flickr (CC BY-NC 2.0).

Mexico’s election of its first woman president, Claudia Sheinbaum, has brought hope that more of the country’s environmental issues will get attention from the government. Sheinbaum is the former mayor of Mexico City and an environmental scientist by trade. She co-authored the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report that won the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize, yet her campaign has been light on rigorous environmental policy, some critics have said. As the successor of AMLO, her support of the controversial Tren Maya and oil giant Pemex has raised red flags about her commitment to conservation and the energy transition.

Venezuela’s electoral campaign, with Nicolas Maduro’s victory still highly contested, had little space for environmental issues, even though the country has plunged into a crisis so severe that many observers have called it an ecocide. Mining has torn through the Amazon Rainforest. A neglected oil industry has polluted the coast. Protected areas are plundered for their timber and exotic species. Funds for scientific research have all but dried up. Funds for park guards have dwindled, as well.

A year of wildfires and drought

Wildfires have scorched millions of hectares of forest across South America so far this year. From Bolivia to Brazil, Peru to Argentina, the continent has been gripped by one of its worst fire seasons in decades, with deforestation and drought fueling the flames.

Bolivia has been hit the hardest, with more than 7 million hectares (17 million acres) of forest and natural vegetation scorched by late September. This made 2024 Bolivia’s worst year for fires on record. There were three times more fires in Bolivia in 2024 than in previous years, devastating biodiversity and Indigenous territories.

Brazil, home to 60% of the Amazon, also faced extreme fire activity. In the Brazilian Pantanal, more than 1.3 million hectares (3.2 million acres) burned by October, marking one of the most destructive fire seasons in recent history.

Peru has also declared a state of emergency in six regions as fires spread across the country. By late September, the fires had killed 20 people, injured more than 160, and burned more than 12,300 hectares (30,400 acres) of natural vegetation, while severe drought in the Amazon left several Indigenous communities isolated. Meanwhile, Colombia reported 44,000 hectares (109,000 acres) destroyed by fires in September alone. In Mexico, heat waves have also had severe impacts: by August 2024, the country had recorded at least 125 heat-related deaths and 2,308 cases of heat stroke, along with power outages, wildfires, and mass die-offs of threatened howler monkeys.

*The Amazon has experienced its worst fire season in 19 years, while Pantanal wetlands have already burned 15% of its area. Image courtesy of Fernando Donasci/Environment and Climate Change Ministry.*

In early 2024, Venezuela experienced record-breaking fires. Apart from the highest number of fires in any January and February for the last two decades, wildfires continued into early May, devastating national parks and affecting the capital of Caracas. To that point, up to 2 million hectares (4.94 million acres) of land appear to have already burned, experts estimated.

Mining, energy and infrastructure projects expanded

In Bolivia, lithium extraction has brought on new issues for communities neighboring the industry. In Salar de Uyuni, a lithium plant opened in 2023 has been using untested equipment and has been possibly mismanaging its use of freshwater, raising concerns for residents about whether the Bolivian government can responsibly manage the rapid growth of the industry.

In Nicaragua, despite US sanctions, harmful mining has continued unabated. Between 2021 and 2023, the amount of Nicaraguan land concessioned for mining more than doubled, from 923,681 hectares (2,282,465 acres) to 1.8 million hectares (4,447,896 acres), according to the Ministry of Energy and Mines. Mining concessions now take up around 15% of the country’s total land area.

In Colombia, approval of the $420.4 million Alacrán mining project in northern Colombia has alarmed residents, who say they might lose their food and drinking water to unregulated pollution, causing them to relocate to other parts of the country. In Guyana, a series of ongoing road projects traveling over 500 kilometers (310 miles) from the capital of Georgetown to the city of Lethem, in the south, are supposed to improve access to more rural parts of Guyana while facilitating international trade, most notably with Brazil. But the project also crosses sensitive wetlands and Indigenous communities, raising concerns about how the government will manage future development there.

*Plant of Bolivian Lithium Deposits, in Uyuni. Photo: YLB.*

Earlier in the year, Mongabay reporter Maxwell Radwin and videographer Caitlin Cooper embarked on a journey aboard the Tren Maya, traveling from Cancún to Palenque and back, on a mission to uncover critical issues associated with the rail project, including impacts on communities and ecosystems.

Criminality encroaches on ecosystems

In Ecuador, an investigation by Mongabay and Codigo Vidrio found that for the last seven years, the Los Lobos criminal group has become deeply entrenched in illegal gold mining across all of the country’s provinces, taking over the mineral’s supply chain. The group that has entered even protected areas, has spread fear among local and Indigenous communities.

The Maya Biosphere Reserve, which stretches 2.2 million hectares (5.3 million acres) across northern Guatemala, has seen a wave of land invasions in 2024 in areas that have historically not faced threats of colonization. As new trails open up and fires spread, officials have raised concerns not just about deforestation but about potentially losing control of the area altogether.

In Colombia, the Chinese-owned Buritica gold mine lost control over 60% of its operations as its tunnels have been invaded by informal miners associated with Colombia’s largest criminal armed group, the Gaitanista Army of Colombia (EGC), also known as the Gulf Clan. Armed groups have increasingly gained power in the country: one report found that one of Colombia’s biggest active FARC dissident groups, the Central Armed Command (EMC), controls much of the Amazon rainforest in the departments of Guaviare, Meta and Caquetá.

*The Maya Biosphere Reserve in Guatemala. Large-scale deforestation in the region has been linked, in part, to narco-trafficking, say experts. Image courtesy of CIFOR via Flickr (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0).*

In the Peruvian Amazon, cocaine has gained more ground. According to official data from MAAP, the surface area of coca production in Peru is increasing, particularly in the central Peruvian Amazon, along the Andes Mountains in the regions of Ucayali and Huánuco, leading to further threats and killings of Indigenous leaders. At the same time, experts have warned that organizations associated with the drug trade have diversified into mining, logging and land-grabbing enterprises, redrawing the map of criminal networks in Latin America.

Green finance has also continued stirring controversy. In early 2024, a Mongabay investigation revealed that several companies registered in Latin American countries claiming to have U.N. endorsement have persuaded Indigenous communities to hand over the economic rights to their forests for decades to come. Indigenous communities in Peru, Bolivia and Panama were promised jobs and local development projects in exchange for putting on the market more than 9.5 million hectares (23.5 million acres) of forests. The U.N. entities cited by the companies have rejected any involvement.

Conservation efforts carry on, despite obstacles

While Latin America might be battling many chronic issues, it still abounds in stories about conservation successes and new solutions to older problems. In Beni, Bolivia, a new approach to ranching has succeeded in bringing more sustainable practices and helping regenerate native grasses in the local savannas. In Peru, conservationists have come together to help protect the critically endangered Lima leaf-toed gecko (Phyllodactylus sentosus), which lives in Lima’s archaeological sites, while in Iquitos, communities are struggling to protect turtle species from illegal trade and local culinary traditions.

*Illegal bird traders have aggressively sought out the red siskin for more than a century. Image courtesy of SRCS.*

Research has shown that in Ecuador community-led conservation initiatives were more effective in curbing páramo loss than state-protected areas, while in Guyana, local Indigenous communities have set up a conservation zone for the rare red siskin (Spinus cucullata) finch to protect it from illegal trade and habitat loss.

Banner image: Mist rising from the Amazon rainforest at dawn. Photo by Rhett A. Butler for Mongabay.

Posted on January 1, 2025 by Nice Flowers

An underground gold war in Colombia is ‘a ticking ecological time bomb’

In Colombia’s Buriticá municipality, a gold mine owned by Chinese company Zijin has become a hotspot of environmental damage, criminal activity and conflict.
Zijin announced earlier this year that it had lost control of 60% of its mining operations to the illegal miners, who have taken over the mine’s tunnels or collapsed them.
Illegal mining has expanded in and around the mine, with miners using mercury, explosives and heavy machinery to extract gold, contaminating ecosystems and threatening the geological stability of the area.
The illegal miners flock here from around the country, and are associated with the Gaitanista Army of Colombia (EGC), also known as the Gulf Clan, Colombia’s largest criminal armed group.

Nearly 100 underground tunnels, running a combined length of more than 84 kilometers, or 52 miles, crisscross and plunge into the depths of the mountain that hosts the Zijin gold mine in Buriticá, northeastern Colombia. Since 2021, those tunnels have been invaded by informal miners associated with Colombia’s largest criminal armed group, the Gaitanista Army of Colombia (EGC), called the “Gulf Clan” by the government, who are digging their own honeycomb of tunnels into the same massive gold deposits.

Confrontations between the informal miners Zijin security personnel have at times escalated into underground gun battles. And as the mine acts as a magnet for increasing criminality, both social and environmental destruction have followed.

Residents describe the situation as “a ticking ecological time bomb.” Some say they worry that the thousands of poorly constructed tunnels built by the informal miners are in danger of collapsing the mountain entirely — a fear also expressed after investigations by the Mining, Environmental and Agrarian Office of Colombia’s Attorney General’s Office.

Concerns over contamination

In a public statement from July, the AGO warned that illegal mining is creating “grave environmental consequences” that include “structural geological risk to the base” of the mountain where the Zijin mine is located.

“All mining, legal or illegal, contributes to ecological damage, and potentially threatens water tables via underground aquifers, causes deforestation and in turn these phenomena threaten biodiversity,” Oscar Alejandro Pérez-Escobar, a Colombian researcher at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, in the U.K., told Mongabay. “The region where Buriticá is located is among the most biodiverse in the Andes.”

But illegal mining is often more damaging than licensed commercial mining operations, because the miners don’t follow state-imposed practices that include basic ecological and safety guidelines, he said.

Mercury being used to agglomerate gold. — *Mercury used to agglomerate gold has contaminated the local water table. Image by Fabio Nascimento.*

Many of the informal mining operations that have sprung up around the mine use mercury as an agent to extract the gold deposits from the ore, as well as explosives to create tunnels or erode mountain faces, and heavy machinery to clear forest for strip-mining.

These illegal underground operations also damage the water table in the region through the use of chemicals and by leaving mining waste, or tailings, in poorly constructed tunnels that stretch deep into the mountain range in which they’re constructed.

“This is incredibly concerning,” Pérez-Escobar said, noting that any toxic materials left in the tunnels “will immediately end up in the water table. The tunnels are dug directly through natural subterranean aquifers in the mountains.”

“Heavy metals left over from mining, or used in mining processes, such as mercury, make their way up through the water table, into the food chain, and threaten flora and fauna alike,” he said. “This eventually becomes a poison for every living thing in the region.”

Mercury, which causes neurological damage in humans, including developmental problems in infants, has been detected in residents of other regions of Colombia where illegal mining has long been prevalent.

A 2017 study by the country’s environmental ministry in the municipalities of Segovia and Remedios found “high levels of mercury” in the breast milk of nearly 12% of lactating mothers. The government of Antioquia department, where the two municipalities are located, didn’t immediately respond to questions sent by Mongabay about whether similar studies had been conducted or were planned in Buriticá.

The Zijin mine operator has also been accused by the informal miners of intentionally dumping “toxic sludge” in tunnels in an attempt to deter illegal miners from entering. The operator has denied the accusations.

A growing minefield

The Zijin mine sits on the largest known gold deposit in South America, an estimated reserve of more than 300 metric tons. The Chinese mining conglomerate that operates it calls it “ultra high-grade” and the country’s “first modern underground mine.”

But amid growing tensions with some local community members since the mine opened in 2020, the Chinese company has been the target of protests and road blockades by informal miners in the region.

The mine was initially built following surveying by Canada-based Continental Gold between 2016 and 2019, which discovered the gold deposits in Buriticá. In 2019, Zijin Mining Group, a multinational Chinese conglomerate, acquired 69.28% of Continental Gold’s shares and took over the Canadian company’s operations in Colombia.

*Buriticá, Colombia, has seen a boom in mining, as it sits on the largest known gold deposit in South America. Image by Joshua Collins.*

Juan Guillermo Pineda is a firefighter who has lived his whole life in Buriticá. “The illegal miners dump the bodies of those who die in the Zijin tunnels,” he told Mongabay over coffee in the idyllic town square. “They know they’ll be found there. So we come to pick them up, identify them, and then notify the families. If there are any families.”

Pineda adds that “We used to all be farmers here. But the kids here aren’t interested in that. Why would they want to poke around in the dirt when they earn 20 times as much looking for gold?”

Previously, the Gaitanistas didn’t have much of a presence in the municipality, despite having effective control over the region. But after Continental Gold’s discovery, things quickly began to change.

“A lot of people started arriving here from other mining regions in the country [in 2020],” said an activist and social leader who asked for anonymity, citing safety concerns. “People started to come here from dangerous places, like Segovia,” a mining town in northern Antioquia where the Gulf Clan maintains a strong presence. The region has a murder rate eight times higher than the national average.

“And now everyone has to pay EGC,” the activist said. “But the extortion isn’t the worst of it. Informal mining has exploded, and deaths have come with that.”

Zijin invested heavily in infrastructure and mining titles in the region. After operations became increasingly dangerous, in 2024 the company filed a lawsuit against the Colombian government. It sought $500 million in damages under Colombian-Canadian trade agreements, claiming Colombia had failed to guarantee basic security for its investment.

In June 2024, Zijin publicly declared it had lost control of more than 60% of its mining operation, as tunnels had been taken over or collapsed by informal miners, while two employees had been killed and dozens more injured. In the same statement, the company announced that it had recorded “2,260 explosions using improvised artifacts” and “a total of 2,450 shots fired” during confrontations with illegal miners within its tunnels in 2023.

“The Canadians dressed up the mine, claimed it was safe, and walked away with a nice paycheck,” said Luis, a mid-level manager for Zijin’s operations in Buriticá. He asked that his last name be withheld because he doesn’t have authorization to speak on behalf of the company. “It isn’t the Chinese company’s fault the problems started right afterward.”

*Juan Pineda, a local firefighter, says that miners are working in dangerous, often deadly conditions. Image by Joshua Collins.*

But Zijin’s lawsuit against Colombia is “unlikely to succeed,” said Adriaan Alsema, executive editor of South America-focused news portal Colombia Reports, who has reported on similar legal battles in the past. “The fact that Buriticá rests in a region firmly controlled by EGC is public knowledge. Government lawyers are likely to argue that it was a lack of due diligence on the part of the international conglomerate that is to blame, not Colombian security forces”

Alsema added that “No one is forcing the Zijin mining group to conduct operations here.”

Since 2020, when the Zijin mine opened, Colombian authorities have deployed 50 police from the National Unit Against Illegal Mining and Terrorism (UNMIL), who provide 24-hour security inside the mine, and hundreds of uniformed officers in the regions around Buriticá, where the illegal tunnel entrances are located.

“It hasn’t been enough,” said the activist. They added, however, that many of the informal miners being blamed for environmental and social problems are victims of the organized crime dynamic as well.

Most informal miners there are young and come to Buriticá from all over the country, searching for what seems to be a surefire way to make money.

“These kids are locked underground for weeks. They have no cellphone service, no entertainment,” the activist said. “So a lot of them turn to cocaine or other drugs to aid with the tedium of the work.”

They work shifts of 20 to 30 days locked in the tunnels. Although they can order food and even drugs from those who manage the illegal mining operation, they must pay out of their earnings.

“Some of them, if they’re unlucky, end up in debt,” the activist said.

But more often, miners who are paid based on the amount of ore they extract by the “investors” who oversee the illegal mines, can earn five to six times the monthly minimum wage in Colombia — currently around $360.

“Sometimes, if they strike a rich vein, they can make more though,” Pineda said. He described the work as incredibly dangerous, with workers drowning in floods in badly constructed tunnels, asphyxiated from a lack of proper ventilation, crushed by tunnel collapses that are either unprovoked or triggered by explosives used in mining operations.

“If someone is working in an adjacent illegal tunnel when Zijin workers are using explosives, it can burn all the oxygen in the air for hundreds of meters,” Pineda told Mongabay. “Informal miners have died not even realizing they are suffocating.”

For Luis, the Zijin mine manager, the solution is “a purge.” “Security forces need to clear out all of these strangers who come here and commit crimes. If Zijin leaves, the mine will just become even more of a magnet for armed groups,” he said.

But the activist said the solution isn’t that simple. “You can’t put these kids in jail for accepting an opportunity to improve their economic situation that they view as legitimate,” they said. “They are victims of the armed conflict as much as anyone else. And Zijin, despite their claims otherwise, knew the situation they were getting into.

“They just thought the profit would exceed the risk,” they added.

The departmental government and the Attorney General’s Office have launched programs in cooperation with Zijin to formalize illegal miners in the region, who must undergo environmental and safety training to be granted licenses.

Hugo Valle works as a subcontractor in the program to help the illegal miners enroll. “Mining has to be done in a responsible and sustainable manner,” he told Mongabay. “[President Gustavo] Petro has made environmentalism one of the primary goals of his administration, but we see no presence from the national government.

“Tons of illegal explosives and mercury are entering our town,” he added. “And this industry, carried out by thousands of [illegal] miners, also increases deforestation. They need wood to build their operations. We have already identified two species of trees near extinction that exist only in this region.”

Pérez-Escobar, the ecologist, spoke of a “strong link in Colombia between conflict and environmental destruction. Many times it is the human cost that is more visible,” he said.

“But environmental damage is often less immediately visible and may take decades to repair.”

Banner image: Buriticá is among the most diverse regions in the Andes. Image by Joshua Collins.

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